Out here, lethargy seems to exist in the air and seeps into the water, dragging your spirits into a heavy suffocation of dispassion. It has cumbrous consequences.

Today, not a single person showed up for Generations of Faith and I hold myself foremost to blame. I had taken on a leadership role in regards to this project and have been approaching it with lackluster attitude and energy and I believe this was perceptible to those who participated.

If you want to create a program or a develop something new, anywhere, you have to have some sort of emotional investment in what you are creating or it will not succeed. I’m stuck in the awful school mentality where I believe that as long as I churn something out and turn it in, I’ll get my grade and get on with the quarter. But that kind of thinking can only fail me here. I have to create something I’m proud of. I have to find joy in my work and in the challenges it presents to me and let that joy and the satisfaction of a challenge overcome become visible to those to whom I am, in a sense, selling this program. This isn’t a new idea. I understood this in sophomore Social Justice class when our teacher required us to create a community service program from scratch for a small group project. You can’t assign something like that. You have to be motivated by something beyond a grade. In class, I wasn’t. Our project was lame. But now that I’m a little older, I would like to think that I can motivate myself to work on something I can actually be proud of.

Therein lies my greatest adversary of the past year or longer. How do you combat apathy? How do you stave of lethargy? I don’t think there is a simple answer. Perhaps believing that whatever you invest your time in is indeed a worthy cause (I won’t get into the existentialist turmoil I get into when I try to figure out what I truly deem a worthy cause in my life). Perhaps silly motivational tricks we use to bribe, I mean, entice children to perform well. Maybe a bit of discipline and the repetition of my motto, “SACK. UP.”

We’ve got two weeks until our next scheduled Generations of Faith meeting and I hope (and will work) that the next you hear of it will be a glowing self-assessment.